I also very much dislike for some reason Wolverine is suddenly ailing and sick? Presumably from... his adamentium? Or... stuff in the water? It's the adamantium; he explicitly mentions it when he talks to the doctor ("He's the one who put this poison in me!"). You could ta...

I join the choir of pandemic legacy fans. I probably won't replay the first season but I'll insta-buy the second. Meanwhile, Vast is pretty good - an asymmetric game where up to five players attempt to fulfill their goal first - the Goblins want to kill the Knight who's hunting the Dragon who just ...

In other related weirdness, in junior high we had a somewhat irregular class mixed with our shop class were we were in some sort of speed-reading training. Basically a whole class of (not academically sorted) boys watched a filmstrip that only showed a word at a time as it opened a narrow window fr...

We didn't use equipment cards very much until the last few games, but relationship stuff definitely helped a ton. We didn't actually use equipment cards much, but we abused the Soldier's ability to make Searches easy by recycling equipment cards... Meanwhile, Vast is pretty good - an asymmetric gam...

The work around for the sun expanding in about 4 billion years is to move the earth further away. By then we will be able to to just that. All it would take is a slight speed up for several years. I think regarding the Sun's eventual expansion as a problem is a very optimistic view - if "expan...

Always use a random line out of a Shakespearean sonnet to use as your password, interspersed with three two-digit numbers. For extra security, suggest this method to other people but use Philip Sidney yourself. ... So is the blue checkmark a reference to anything specific, other than the idea of ke...

Well it's pretty weird argument. Since when has the answer to "why is x y-coloured" being "because x is made of y-coloured stuff". That's a paradigmatically bad (or joke) answer. If you're asking why X is Y colour, then it's hard to come up with an answer that differs significan...

Transmitted and reflected light are equally distinct phenomena. "It's because of the color of air, but air is actually dichromatic" is certainly a possibly reasonable answer. I think it's also more honest than the received and rarely understood soundbite. . . . I definitely think people s...

I still remember when my PC-owning friend upgraded and put his old hard drive into his older machine and could fit every game he owned that the machine could run on it at once - an entire shoebox of floppies all installed onto one 400MB drive...

Whatever that movie will be, it is completely irrelevant. The world was beyond repair the moment this movie made it past the elevator pitch. That it has Patrick Stewart in it, in the role he will have... must mean something. :?: :?: :?: :?: :?: :arrow: :| It means Stewart loves the ganj. Or he want...

Open University assignment: What you need to do Take a grapefruit and draw a number of shapes on its peel with a pen (e.g. circles and squares). Make sure your shapes cover at least a third of the surface of the grapefruit. The shapes represent the land masses on Earth. Carefully peel the grapefrui...

I've used Pidgin since the days when it was called Gaim - at its peak, it supported every major chat system at the time - between the introduction of new systems, and certain major players "upgrading" to block third-party clients, it's no longer a panacea for chat-system overload.

In general, the limit of a property is not the property of the limit. Not if it's undefined, it's not. Why not define it to be so? Because it tends to lead to weirder consequences than just saying you can't do it. If you want, you could define 1/0 to be equal to 3 - nothing's stopping you - but I'd...

Instead of allowing an opportunity to leave every day, allow one every hour. Then every minute, every second, every nanosecond... approaching the continuous case as a limit. The implication is that everyone with blue eyes deduces so and leaves instantaneously. Could this idea be made rigorous? In g...

What bugs me is that nobody ever takes advantage of the "form of a question" dodge when the "answer" already is a question; you shouldn't have to say "What is 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'?" or (a recent Final Jeopardy) "What is 'what did you give up for Lent?'?&quot...

Saw it on Thursday - while waiting for the Switch release - possibly as many f-bombs as 4 Weddings, but more evenly spread. Some reviews have been calling it the best X-Men movie (and possibly the best comic book movie) - me, I'd say it's a contender for best movie this year.

A new-ish thing that I hate is when an article has a video at the top, and if you scroll down past it to the text, the video shrinks and moves down to the lower right of the screen. What's worse, I've had it happen that I've loaded a page, clicked "pause" on the video because all I'm inte...

The effect of freezers on bread turns out to be something everyone on the internet has an opinion on, so I try to avoid the subject by just eating all my bread as soon as I get it. I just popped in to share my opinion on the effect of freezers on bread: they ruin it. No matter what you do to defros...

There's also some parts of information that can be conveyed much faster through podcasts or video formats. In a written format, there's no tonal shift, no emphasis on certain parts of sentences apart from writing parts in italics , boldfaced , or rudely in CAPS. When it is about conveying dry factu...

Most people talk faster than they can type (or write). Most people read faster than they can listen. Podcasts/video/etc. which are delivering information that does not require the video component, then, have authors who feel "my time is more valuable than yours." (Or, assuming multitaskin...

When I go to a news site to read a story, CNN for instance, and there's a video at the top, and the story written underneath, I always stop the video and read the text instead. I find the video slightly irritating. But I've no idea if my reaction is common, uncommon, or an age thing, or if there is...

Reading or texting from a phone while walking is endemic in my part of London these days. People striding along the pavement, not looking where they're going, head down, reading their screen. Seems insane to me, but I suppose that's just the way things are, and will continue to be, until technology...

I picked up Life is Strange Episode 1 for free the other day on Steam. Kind of wondering why I've never heard of this game before... I'm extremely impressed so far. Whole series is on for $22, which I expect I'll probably grab as well. The last episode's a bit of an anticlimax, but up to that point...

It's feasible to draw out the entire game tree Here's my favorite: https://xkcd.com/832/ Yeah, it's cool, but aiui it's not the entire game tree: it just tells you one optimal move to make at each stage. It doesn't show you alternative optimal moves and it doesn't show non-optimal moves. Yeah, ther...

Eh, I am left with the impression that Chess seems to come down to practice and memorization more than anything else. Cracked suggests that knowing a few quick plays will be enough to impress most people you play against. http://www.cracked.com/article_20214_5-so-called-signs-genius-that-any-idiot-...

Necroing this thread for a D&D-related discussion that came up here : I'm aiming to have a system that streamlines damage/hitpoints with D&D's d20 check system (rather than having a completely separate sub-system). What I'm coming up with (and what I'd like feedback/criticism on) is based o...

And I finally beat it, on easy, with that Zoltan cruiser. By the end I used a chain ion cannon, that halberd thing, and a pulse laser. With defense and attack drones. Also a cloak and mind control device. Mind control is only useful to keep the enemy distracted and not repairing shield damage, bare...

That's not true, a brachistochrone is always decreasing. Then someone should fix the picture on the wikipedia page, which shows... not that. Yes, they should. http://www.math.wpi.edu/Course_Materials/MA1024A97/images/project2/fig2.gif http://www.math.wpi.edu/Course_Materials/MA1024A97/projects/proj...

Is a constant slope the best option? Can you combine a steep section and a shallow section to cover a horizontal distance with less change in elevation than you'd need to just barely move on a constant slope?